"That truth should be silent I had almost forgot"--Enobarbus in ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, back in Rome after having been too long in Egypt.---------
Melville's PIERRE, Book 4, chapter 5: "Something ever comes of all persistent inquiry; we are not so continually curious for nothing."

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Around 1780 George Parks, then a
young fellow in the Patriot militia, tricked my GGGGGG Grandfather Solomon
Sparks by appealing to his better nature and lived to boast about it in 1833: “Not
long after, & all during said eighteen months service he and others of said
Company of Minute men, Captured Old Solomon Sparks a celebrated Tory. They employed
a Whig from a distant neighborhood and a stranger to said Old Tory to decoy him
out of his house without his gun
under the pretence of being a traveller & enquiring the Road. They
succeeded admirably. He fought bravely without arms and considerably injured
this Applicant by kicking him. He was sent down the Ya[d]kin in a Canoe. After
tied hand and foot on his back he repeatedly hollowed “‘Hurra for King George.’”
(“Celebrated,” of course, meant “notorious.”) Grandpa Sparks may have been the
orneriest of us all, but at least he got his licks in against the young Parks.

I
have to talk about the wretched trickster George Parks because he is the only
source of information about this episode in the life of Grandpa Sparks. Born in
Virginia, Parks was brought to Rowan County (later Wilkes), grew up there, had
a daughter by Jane Rainey out of wedlock in 1778, married twice over the next
decades, had more than a dozen children, and died at the end of 1837 in Monroe
County, Indiana. We forget that North Carolina and South Carolina Scots-Irish
and Germans settled parts of newly opened French Illinois and even Indiana
after the Revolution, opening up new migration trails, particularly about the
time of the War of 1812. George Parks first moved after the war to Burke County,
not taking his first child whom he was supposed to provide for. There in Burke
County (remember that counties changed names and sizes frequently) another
George Parks, nephew of the kidnapper, married Polly Moore, born in January
1791. Polly was the daughter of my cousin Daniel Moore, who at 16 became a
private in the Continental line. The kidnapper’s oldest son, James, was born in
September 1781, the month before Yorktown, a year or so after his busy father
was kicked severely by Solomon Sparks. He lived with his father until he was
twenty-five, as he wrote in a memoir when he was 97, four years before his
death at 101 in Bloomington, Indiana. In 1842 at the age of 78 Cousin Daniel
Moore saddled his horse in the Globe, Burke County, and rode to Bloomington,
Indiana, to see his son-in-law James Parks, son of the kidnapper, and some of the
children of his dead daughter Nancy (1789-1828), and on to Georgetown,
Illinois, to see his daughter Polly and her husband George Parks, namesake and
nephew of the kidnapper. The weather was bad in that long flat stretch between
the two midwestern towns, and Daniel suffered after he made it home to the
Globe. I am proud of Cousin Daniel, uncle of tens of thousands of Arkansas
Cokers. Like it or not, also on the paternal side, I am kin to descendants of
the kidnapper through his son James and Nancy and their children and kin to the
descendants of this James’s cousin George Parks, nephew of the kidnapper, and
his wife Polly. Still worse, James’s and Nancy’s daughter Hannah Parks, born in
1797, married William Nelson Pruitt (1797-1876), one of my Bedford County
Virginia Pruitts, so I am doubly kin to Hannah’s descendants through her and
her husband. I just hope the young trickster of the Yadlin is not kin to Cynthia
Martha Parks Henderson, my GG Grandmother, wife of Samuel Henderson.My Cousin Lois says that in the
South if you are not kin you are connected. The trouble is that most of the
time you ARE kin. What a wretched thing to do to Solomon Sparks!

About Me

Hershel Parker is the author of the 1997 Pulitzer finalist, Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851 (Johns Hopkins, 1996) and Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851-1891 (Johns Hopkins, 2002). Each volume won the top award from the Association of American Publishers. Parker’s 1984 Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction brought biographical evidence to bear on textual theory, literary criticism, and literary theory. Parker and the team of now mature Hayford students are finishing the final volume of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition. Robert Sandberg is helping with the layout and design of three print volumes of The New Melville Log. Parker in late 2013 is at work on Ornery People: What Was a Depression Okie?, a book about his white and red American ancestors. Parker's Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative was put on the NEW YORKER blog as one of the Books to Watch Out for in January ("Parker writes with a rare combination of humor and passion"). On 30-31 March 2013 the WALL STREET JOURNAL gave a page and a third to Carl Rollyson's review of MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY as "a superb contribution to a fledgling field: the study of the writing of literary lives."